Gnus + Leafnode = 10 minutes to start

[SINNER]

Hello,

[sorry nsr, thought I'd bring the emacs pros in on this one]

I am using:

Ubuntu 6.06
emacs 21.4.1
No Gnus V0.4

emacs starts just fine.

after I 'M-x gnus' it loads the active file and then gets new news, during 
this time the system goes to 80%> CPU usage for about 10 minutes until 
finally putting me at the group buffer.

I found that in ~/News/marks it seems to be duplicating my leafnode spool 
which is on this same machine and located in /var/spool/news that is a lot 
of data which I subsequently removed and have not started gnus since.

slrn/tin/pan et al have no issues on the same box for the same leafnode 
server.

Once I am at the group buffer I can move around just fine with no delays 
pressing 'g' duplicates the behavior.

My ~/.gnus.el is very small:

(setq user-mail-address "SINNER@gates_of_hell.invalid")
(setq user-full-name "SINNER")
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "localhost"))

I am using NNTP instead of spool per the manual reccomendation WRT 
leafnode.

Will gladly provide any missing info (once I get home). I just wanted to 
add another reader to my arsonal but this one has not been playing nice. I 
am using precomplied .deb packages that were installed via apt-get.

I have not tried to directly connect to anyone of my 'foreign' servers 
using emacs/gnus.

any suggestions appreciated.

-- 
David